Louis paused, his mind working hard to retrieve the image of Frank sitting across from him. Frank’s sunburned nose, his jaw shadowed with whiskers, his sad brown eyes moving from the tabletop to the boy, and up to...
“Mel, there was a painting. A big old ugly painting hanging over the bar. I thought it looked out of place and Frank made some comment about it, but I don’t remember. Damn, what did he say?”
“Forget it. What did the painting look like?”
“Shit, I don’t know. Some Roman guys having an orgy or something with a bunch of fat women.”
Louis heard a clank as Landeta set the phone down. “Mel? You there? Where’d you go?”
Mel’s voice suddenly came back. “I went to get one of Frank’s books you brought over, the mythology book. I was looking through it after you left and I remember seeing something. I think Frank marked it. Hold on.”
He could hear Landeta turning pages. “Yeah, here it is. And he had it bookmarked.”
“What?”
“A painting. Roman guys and fat women, as you called it. Hold on. Let me get set up under the light.”
Louis went to the kitchen. Holding the receiver with his shoulder, he opened the refrigerator, pulled out a Heineken, and popped off the top. He was taking the first swig when Landeta came back on.
“Okay,” Landeta started. “This painting I’m looking at shows Romans carrying off fat women in front of a colosseum type of place.”
Another pause. Louis knew Landeta was struggling to see the photo. “And there’s some guy in a red cape overseeing all this.”
“Yeah, that’s it,” Louis said.
“It’s by somebody named Poussin. It’s called ‘The Rape of the Sabine Women’."
“Rape of who?”
“Listen, damn it. Don’t say a word.” Landeta’s voice slowed and Louis knew he was using his magnifying glass again to read.
“Okay, it’s based on the Romulus and Remus myth. The two brothers were building a city and one of them ended up killing the other one over the size of a fence or something.”
Louis took a drink, growing impatient at Landeta’s slow flow of information. Things were starting to fall into place, the picture coming into focus, and he wanted to know the rest of it now. He began to pace.
“Okay, they were the guys who built Rome,” Landeta continued. “But they didn’t have enough women for all the men to have wives —-”
Louis interrupted Landeta. “So they took them from somewhere else and raped them.”
“Yeah...no, wait.” Landeta paused. “Listen to this. In Roman days, rape didn’t mean what it does now. It comes from the Latin word raptus, which means to carry off by force.”
Louis stopped pacing. His mind was whirring.
“Louis? You there?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m thinking.”
“About what?”
“That guy Jung was treating for mental illness.” Louis began pacing again. “He had dreams about leaving his wolf herd behind but when he does, he feels isolated and tries to go back, where he is surrounded by women from his herd he no longer recognizes.”
“Yeah, Frank underlined it,” Landeta said.
“And tonight, I found something else about wolves in another one of Frank’s books, something about a fertility rite where unmarried men dress up in wolf skins and beat the village women with animal skins and —-”
“What?”
“Never mind. I’ll show it to you tomorrow. The important thing now is that island.” Louis stopped pacing. “Mel, he went back there for a reason.”
“Maybe he was from there. What’s out there besides the restaurant?”
Louis was quiet, trying to remember. “I only saw the restaurant. But there could have been houses on the other side.”
“Like what? A private community thing, like Useppa or North Captiva?”
“I don’t know.”
“Or like out on Sanibel?”
“I told you, Mel —-”
“C’mon, Louis. What was your sense of it?”
“Sense? What do you mean?”
“What did the place feel like?”
“Fuck, Mel. I saw trees. That was all!”
“Think. Use your other senses.”
Louis was quiet. “Okay, it was way the hell out in the sound. It felt isolated.”
“Try again.”
“It felt...forgotten.”
Landeta was silent. “By who?” he asked finally.
Louis ran a hand over his face. “Time? I don’t know,” he said.
There was another silence. Louis could hear Landeta breathing.
“What’s the name of the island again?” Landeta asked finally.